AMLO All Along
Obradorismo was nationalist austerity governance under the pretense of left-wing populism
The Art of the Obituary (6): Susan Sontag
Annie Leibovitz, Susan at the House on Hedges Lane (1988), Brooklyn Museum Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) She was bookish almost from birth.…
The Loser Wins
Zuckerberg is not just any loser. His victory is not a win for equality, but instead signals the rise of a new, no less inegalitarian…
Messages The City Wants Us To Hear
Some excerpts from Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s Speedology (2002) 1. The Fastest Way to Adventure is to Stand Still Boredom is an illusion. Boredom is the…
Only One Part of Us Is Sane
“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and…
The Art of the Obituary (5): Ike Turner
Ike Turner (November 5, 1931 – December 12, 2007) Though his musical and entrepreneurial talent was enormous, he had been slow to break out of…
The Lover
Julia Kristeva (1987): We have lost the relative strength and security that the old moral codes guaranteed our loves either by forbidding them or determining…
The Art of the Obituary: Janet Frame
Janet Frame (August 28, 1924 - January 29, 2004) She needed ‘treatment’— electro-convulsive therapy at the Seacliff hospital in Dunedin. Every part of this therapy…
Humanity and Suffering on Craigslist
pp. 26-27 Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café” First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it…
“What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’…
The Art of Obituary: Anna Nicole Smith
Anna Nicole Smith (November 28, 1967 – February 8, 2007) She acted too, though it was the Breasts that stole every scene, full in Leslie Nielsen’s…
Love Worth Fighting For
More than ever, we now need to think of love as ennobling resistance to what alreadyis, modeling the idea that difficult things are worth the…
Resisting The Chilling Effect
Images by Barbara Kruger Abrahamian explains why a salon revival may be the best way to fight epistemic closure in the digital age— where the internet…
Spontaneity On Demand
Salvador Dalí. A Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds (1936) “Mediating our identity and our experience recapitulates it in a form that can circulate and be…
children are our future: resistance, addiction and the digital natives
It’s easy enough to amass anecdotal evidence of rising internet addiction. The marathon Asian gamers who prefer to starve rather than leave their terminal; the…
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
Bail Bloc 2.0
Our work on immigration, ICE, borders, and detention
Liquid Border
An excerpt from The Law of the Sea by Annalisa Camilli
United States v. Scott Daniel Warren
The criminalization of humanitarian aid at the border enacts a fantasy of desolate individuation. Scott Warren’s felony trial reiterates the necessity to keep reaching out.
Abolish the ICE Prison Complex
A recent Supreme Court decision reminds us that the law has no interest in lifting the veil that covers immigration prisons
Border Theories
What would it look like to put a power structure on trial? Interweaving visual narratives of the Mexico–United States border show the uneasy relation between objects and people.
Soft Borders
The soft patriotic trust in Canada's softly administered border is fully compatible with the logic of restriction.
Fash at Sea
The end of Defend Europe’s fascistic campaign to block migrants’ boats in the Mediterranean doesn’t mean the threat is over
Operation Streamline
The border’s dream is for undocumented immigrants to be its most reliable missionaries. But the immigrant who crosses the border is the affirmation of a life that transcends it.
In the Water
An immigrant in the water is a story or a lesson, but an immigrant on land is our responsibility--they might become our neighbor
Cross-Border Operations
It is no longer plausible to describe the state’s borders as geographically fixed or the state as distinguishable from capital or “markets.”
Empire Records
Guantánamo Diary's missing passages connect it with the US empire's deeper history of far-flung capture and detention networks